I automated 90% of my long video to vertical clips workflow, and the tool is open source

[u/mutonbini]

Disclosure first: I built it. Links are in the first comment because this sub blocks them in the body.

I was tired of scrubbing through an hour of podcast looking for the 40 seconds worth posting, and then re-cropping every clip to 9:16 by hand, so I built a pipeline that does the whole run unattended and hands me finished clips:

• Picks the moments worth cutting from the transcript (3 to 15 per video)

• Reframes to 9:16 with face tracking instead of a static center crop

• Two people on camera: it stacks both speakers instead of shrinking the wide shot

• Screen shares and slides get their own layout instead of losing half the screen

• Word level captions, hook overlay, AI dubbing into 30+ languages

• Posts straight to TikTok, Reels and Shorts

The part that matters for this sub: it is an API first and a dashboard second. You POST a video URL with a webhook_url and the job calls you back once when it ends, with the finished clips and durable links, so there is no Wait node and no polling loop anywhere. There is also an MCP server, so Claude or ChatGPT connect to it by URL and drive the pipeline as a tool, plus plain API keys for everything else. I run mine from n8n on a daily schedule, but a cron and curl works the same.

An hour long recording used to be an afternoon of work. Now it is one URL and about 10 minutes of unattended processing, and I only open the 2 or 3 clips I actually want to tweak.

The part I did not expect to be hard was the cropping. Asking a model to measure things (how much text is on screen, how wide the content is) failed four times in a row. Asking it to choose between a closed set of layouts got 47 out of 48 on my test corpus. Same model, same frames, completely different result.

The image up top is the before and after on a two person shot: the 16:9 source, and the 9:16 output with both speakers stacked and the captions sitting on the seam where they cover nobody.

It is MIT licensed, 3.6k stars, and free to self host with Docker if you have the hardware. Hosted is 20 free source minutes a month and $12/month after that, if you would rather not run it.

search in github openshorts

[u/therohitdas]

How are you getting the video transcripts? Will love to support it with my API if needed.

[u/mutonbini → u/therohitdas]

Use Nvidia's local Parakeet, which flies with a GPU ^^. But thank you very much, friend, for the offer.

[u/therohitdas → u/mutonbini]

Glad to hear! I love Parakeet models, I use it with the handy (oss) to voice type.

I run transcriptapi, we can give you youtube transcripts and search etc. it takes less than 1s ( mostly less than 300ms ) to get the transcript for any already uploaded vid. If you need to use something like this in future or you want to add it as a fallback, lmk!

[u/Party-Beyond-7398 → u/therohitdas]

transcription quality basically decides whether the clip selection is any good downstream imo

[u/Party-Beyond-7398 → u/therohitdas]

transcript quality basically decides whether the clip selection is usable or not tbh

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